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Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Microsoft previews tools for new Office, SharePoint apps

Developers who want to sell their add-in applications in
the coming Office Store can check out the preview of Microsoft's newest
toolset.

Microsoft today released a preview build of a new toolset
codenamed "Napa," which is aimed at those building application
add-ins for the coming versions of Office and SharePoint.

The Office 365 development tools (Napa) are designed to
accommodate the "new Cloud App Model" in the more cloud-centric
Office 15 wave of products, according to a new blog post from Microsoft
Corporate Vice President Jason Zander. This new model allows apps to be hosted
on SharePoint, Windows Azure Web sites or a user's own server.

The new Office apps and add-ins -- which are codenamed
"Agaves" -- can be hosted in the cloud and/or published and sold
through the new Office Store. Enterprise IT users also can be privately
distribute Napa-developed apps via an internal App Catalog, Zander noted.

Microsoft's definition of Office apps is worth nothing. A new MSDN Article about Office apps explains:

An app for Office is basically a webpage that is hosted
inside an Office client application. You can use an app for Office to extend
the functionality of a document, email message, meeting request, or
appointment. Apps for Office can run in multiple environments and clients,
including rich Office desktop clients, Office Web Apps, mobile browsers, and
also on-premises and in the cloud. After you develop and publish your apps for
Office to the Office Store or to an onsite catalog, they will be available to consumers
from their Office 2013 Preview applications.

"We wanted to provide a lightweight, in-browser
experience, so that you could quickly build your SharePoint or Office web app
in the same browser where they would run," Zander blogged.

Napa is going to be a free development-environment app
for SharePoint, and is meant to be "an online companion to Visual
Studio," Zander explained. Because Napa is Web-based, developers won't
need to install anything on their machines; they'll be able to start coding
inside their browsers. But if and when Office developers need more
"advanced" tools, they will be able to switch to Visual Studio 2012
and continue their work in that IDE, he said.

"Of course, in parallel with 'Napa,' you can still
continue using the existing extensibility models for Office and SharePoint,
like VBA, COM, VSTO, and SharePoint solutions," Zander said. However --
and this is key -- apps developed using these tools will not be able to be
submitted to the new Office Store, Zander added.

Napa will allow the development of "all of the app
types for Office and SharePoint allowing developers to run in both the web app
and rich client versions of the Office applications (i.e. Excel, Word),"
Zander said.

Microsoft launched a preview of the coming Office Store
on July 16. There already are two dozen Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 add-ins
in the store, including ones for Twitter, LinkedIn, dictionaries, forms and
more.